Does the "no afterlife" ever scare you?

[_Nightlion]

This is how the Kirtland Temple began and was quickly defiled by the unclean and so no more glory was found upon it.

Nightlion, can you explain this in more detail? How was the Kirtland Temple defiled, and who are the unclean who defiled it?

I am not prepared to dazzle you with great research as I only tossed this out off the cuff. In general the LDS Church never was worthy or clean before the Lord. The Lord forgave Joseph and others for their great efforts at times. The Church was always under condemnation. (See D&C 84:50-59) So the Kirtland Temple dedication glory could only have been justified by mercy and compassion. It supposes me that the Lord wanted to give them a foretaste of what Zion COULD be. With the failure of Zion's Camp to enliven a greater valiance, the Lord tried to pump up the faith of the people with the Kirtland Temple dedication and the restoration of the keys from the prophets.
That it was a merciful glory and not so much a worthy glory the Lord said as much in his own words;

D&C 110
1 The veil was taken from our minds, and the eyes of our understanding were opened.
2 We saw the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit, before us; and under his feet was a paved work of pure gold, in color like amber.
3 His eyes were as a flame of fire; the hair of his head was white like the pure snow; his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun; and his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters, even the voice of Jehovah, saying:
4 I am the first and the last; I am he who liveth, I am he who was slain; I am your advocate with the Father.
5 Behold, your sins are forgiven you; you are clean before me; therefore, lift up your heads and rejoice.
6 Let the hearts of your brethren rejoice, and let the hearts of all my people rejoice, who have, with their might, built this house to my name.
7 For behold, I have accepted this house, and my name shall be here; and I will manifest myself to my people in mercy in this house.
8 Yea, I will appear unto my servants, and speak unto them with mine own voice, if my people will keep my commandments, and do not pollute this holy house.

A merciful outpouring of blessing and power and a revelation of Jesus Christ and the prophets to attempt yet again to get the Restoration to take, alas, the Gentiles could not handle it. Many simply freak out. Freaked out on Joseph big time around Kirtland. Even, Oliver Cowdery, who had this great revelation WITH Joseph turned against him.

One more time, by gathering upon the land of Zion, the Lord would see if the people would sanctify themselves. They did not and were scattered. The rest is just history. By Nauvoo the Lord was by and large done with the Gentiles.

From then on the Church had to redefine its core value. Soon the new doctrine of exaltation replaced Zion, or displaced it. Something to keep the fire lit for a later day when Zion might come back around and galvanize into a reality in the due time of the Lord. In the meantime the rudiments of the Restoration needed to be kept even if the lost principle or neglected principle of how one becomes clean before the Lord fled into the wilderness until the Lord would do his own work and bring forth his strange act.

Lorenzo Snow telling his daughter, or was it his granddaughter, that he had seen Jesus Christ in the Salt Lake Temple was a fantastic lie in my opinion. And I have a crate full of reasons for thinking so. Has anyone else claimed a revelation of Jesus Christ in any LDS temple? Nothing comes to mind. Polluted all.

D&C 84:58-59
58 That they may bring forth fruit meet for their Father’s kingdom; otherwise there remaineth a scourge and judgment to be poured out upon the children of Zion.
59 For shall the children of the kingdom pollute my holy land? Verily, I say unto you, Nay.

[_Jhall118]

You know all those billions of years before you were born? Did those suck?

Yah I thought not. QED

If you still fear death, then stop being lazy, get a degree in biology, and help fight it you wussy.

[_quark]

If you still fear death, then stop being lazy, get a degree in biology, and help fight it you wussy.

Ok Mr tough guy. Someday I will be brave enough to kiss marine life like you.

[_Jhall118]

If you still fear death, then stop being lazy, get a degree in biology, and help fight it you wussy.

Ok Mr tough guy. Someday I will be brave enough to kiss marine life like you.

Lol I started to write "but my degree is in Neurobiology not Marine... oh crap my picture". Let me tell you, you haven't lived until you are smooching a dolphin while your wife is watching, dripping wet... from swimming in salt water.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Welp. To the OP, I have to tell you that it doesn't scare me so much as it disappoints me. I would prefer to be able to escape this speck of dust we occupy and explore the Universe in all its wonderment. I would love to see the myriad life forms that have evolved in their perspective environes. I wish I could observe a Black Hole up close and live to tell about it. I'd like to understand just how big our reality is.

But I'll never get to do that, and that's very disappointing to me.

The upside is we live in an amazing period where we're so connected, and have so much available to us. It's a big world, and if I'm forced to live my days out here then so be it. There's a lot of cool crap here and if there's no afterlife then we can make this life wonderful by simply slowing down, observing the observable, and noticing all the small things.

I think that's a pretty good compromise. :)

V/R
Dr. Cam

[_Simon Belmont]

See point #3 here.

I like what you have to say in the above. Can we talk about it?

The flow of time is an illusion. All moments of one's life exist simultaneously. Thus death is merely a relative, not an absolute, end of life. It is merely a bookend, if you will, for the temporal space one inhabits.

What is beyond the bookend? Some type of non-temporal existence? Sure, time as an idea is a construct of humans (I'm late to work, we were married on April 1st...), but time as the observation of change or motion is pretty objective, I think. So time does, in fact, exist as a linear measurement of change, right? I'm not sure how all moments exist simultaneously, but am hoping you can expound a bit.

The present self exists only in the present moment; in the next moment the present self will have died and a new self will have been born. (Think of the old saying that you can never step into the same river twice.) Viewed from this perspective, the death of the self after the final moment of life is not qualitatively different from the death of the self after any other moment of life.

Except that in the final moment, there is no new self.

Also, CK, I have often thought that an Atheist wouldn't fear death because, as Hitchens maintains, you won't know when you're dead. There won't be a you to know anything. What do you think about that?

[_quark]

Thanks doc and everyone for the great comments. Mr. Sock Pupput and Tchild and everyone else had some great things to say.

by the way, if anyone needs to feel a little more confident today, just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

[_CaliforniaKid]

What is beyond the bookend? Some type of non-temporal existence?

The self does not exist outside the bookends of its life. It exists only within the bookends.

Sure, time as an idea is a construct of humans (I'm late to work, we were married on April 1st...), but time as the observation of change or motion is pretty objective, I think. So time does, in fact, exist as a linear measurement of change, right? I'm not sure how all moments exist simultaneously, but am hoping you can expound a bit.

Take a look at your keyboard. It varies across its length and width, does it not? And yet all points along that continuum exist equally. Each individual point is static and fixed, despite the variations that exist to the right and the left of it. Time is like that. Imagine the universe as a four-dimensional "block," in which time is the fourth dimension. There are variations throughout the fourth dimension, but each individual point in this dimension is fixed.

What distinguishes time from the other three dimensions is how we experience it. When I observe a point in space, I can simultaneously remember other points on all sides of it. But when I observe a point in time, I can only remember other points in its past, not in its future. (According to Stephen Hawking, this is because our brain needs energy to store information, and the law of entropy dictates that energy transfer can only go one "direction" through the fourth dimension.)

Except that in the final moment, there is no new self.

There is no new self at any moment. There is only the present self. The future self is always inaccessible to the present self even if a future self exists, so it need be no great loss to the present self if it knows a future self does not exist.

Also, CK, I have often thought that an Atheist wouldn't fear death because, as Hitchens maintains, you won't know when you're dead. There won't be a you to know anything. What do you think about that?

Hitchens makes a good point. But although we won't know we're dead after it happens, we do know now that we will someday be dead, and for most of us that's a disturbing thought regardless of whether we'll be aware of it after it happens. I think what I said in the link above goes a little farther toward resolving our present death anxieties than Hitchens's argument does.

[_sock puppet]

Also, CK, I have often thought that an Atheist wouldn't fear death because, as Hitchens maintains, you won't know when you're dead. There won't be a you to know anything. What do you think about that?

Precisely. So in order to gain leverage and control, some men concocted the notion of an afterlife, a god that wants you to do (conveniently) what these men tell you to do, and an eternity of hell, fire and damnation from this god if you do not do what these men tell you. I.e., the fear of god was born as a tool to subjugate others against their free will.

[_quark]

I don't want to give people the impression that I'm laying awake at night in fear of an atheist death. Far from it. Actually, there was a time during my earlier life in which I feared death exceedingly. I believed God would show a movie to the Universe of all my misdeeds, which oddly centered around the thing I lied to the bishop about. Hint: it starts with an M. I felt I could never tell him about all my experiences and thus could never ever be fully forgiven. I eventually resigned to believe that my I unforgiven deeds would show up on the silver screen and was okay with it. After a few years, the fear factor dies down and you become accustomed to it.

As a believer, death was a mixed bag.